Year: 2020

The struggle to keep India’s Covid-19 patients breathing

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteOn May 10, 2020, we admitted the first patient with Covid19 to our hospital. We did speedily ramp up critical care, to provide oxygenated hospital beds, ICUs, medicines, and ventilators, gloves, N95 masks, PPEs, and back up supplies.  Oxygen. Perhaps for the first time we realised how important was Oxygen, the sole therapy for managing COVID-19-induced … Read more

Covid and Ayurveda

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteI criticised Patanjali Ayurveda’s claimed cure for COVID-19 for making unsubstantiated claims of efficacy. The drugs it is offering are untested and unproven. They haven’t proven their mettle in a well-conducted adequately sized randomized controlled trial. The proponents of Ayurveda, however, ask – can Ayurveda, or alternative medicine in general, be evaluated in the same … Read more

Medical Conferences sans Drug Industry Sponsorship

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Reading Time: 3 minutesMedical conferences are fast degenerating into melas that educate, entertain, amuse and irritate and deceive—not necessarily in that order. One can smell, see and feel the drug industry everywhere, advertising on the walls, shaping the contents and style of educational programmes, tempting with gifts and free meals, travel and other amenities. In 2003, MGIMS became … Read more

Ethical Challenges of Research in a Pandemic

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe pressure for an effective treatment or vaccine for COVID-19 is high. There are more than 2,000 studies on COVID-19 across the world; many of these are trials on humans to develop vaccines, and to test the efficacy of drugs for this new disease. The urgency of this pandemic presents new, acute ethical challenges in … Read more

Covid 19: We need well-designed clinical trials

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteOn June 23, Patanjali Ayurved claimed that its preparations, ‘Coronil’ would cure COVID-19 in just a week.  Scientists, researchers, physicians and media registered their strong protest and expressed robust disbelief for the outrageous and misleading ads.  The company claimed that their medicine was tested in a randomised controlled trial (RCT) among COVID-19 positive patients and … Read more

The many questions about Favipiravir

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) has approved Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, an Indian pharmaceutical company, to sell generic versions of Favipiravir for the treatment of COVID-19. This drug, originally invented by a Japanese company, was meant to treat influenza. After the outbreak of COVID-19, doctors in China and Russia started using it to treat COVID-19 … Read more

Favipiravir and Covid

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteDr Priya Mendiratta wrote a post on my poem on Favipiravir and Covid. Thank you Dr SP Kalantri for still guiding us to always practice ethically, not abandon logical thinking and scientific approach . Dr Kalantri’s thoughts on Favipiravir, a new oral drug launched in India yesterday by Glenmark to fight Covid19 infection. He is … Read more